"He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood." – E. M. Forster

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Archive for July 29th, 2006

Saturday, 29 July 2006

WordPress 2.0.4 released (just in time for Camp d’WordPress)

WordPress 2.0.4 is a recommended version that includes security and bug fixes. It’s an easy upgrade from 2.0.3.

If you’re still reading this post, then you probably know about WordCamp, a free, daylong WordPress conference next week in San Francisco. It’ll take place at Swedish American Hall. (Normally I wouldn’t have mentioned the venue, but I thought it interesting because I know Richard Buckner’s played shows there.) Although I’m not so crazy about the name “WordCamp,” it sounds like a great event and I’m sorry that I’ll have to miss it. If you happen to go (free BBQ and swag! meet Matt, Podz and Donncha!), and there are WordPress stickers, well, I wouldn’t say no to one for my guitar case…

Speaking of WordPress, let’s talk about anti-spam plugins for a bit. When I finally upgraded musings from 1.5.2 to 2.0.3 last month (I’d already converted the 1.5 branch to 2.0 for some other blogs, and didn’t really see the need to mess with this blog until 2.0 became a little more streamlined), I ended up letting go of Elliott Back’s WP-Hashcash and activating Michael Hampton’s Bad Behavior and Matt’s Akismet. WP-Hashcash proved to be a stringent spam blocker, and I used it for well over a year. However, spammers increasingly found ways around it; the latest incarnation was pretty effective but it didn’t seem to play well with 2.0.3. My WP anti-spam arsenal now includes the triumvirate of Bad Behavior, Akismet and Dr Dave’s Referrer Karma, which I’ve also been using for over a year. Admittedly, Referrer Karma doesn’t seem to have much to do these days since I installed Bad Behavior (e.g. BB apparently has blocked 650 access attempts here in the past week), but since RK requires little maintenance, I’ve let it stand as a backup.

Based on my WordPress experiences in general, I’d recommend Bad Behavior and/or Referrer Karma, and Akismet. They’re easy to maintain (RK may require a bit more time to carry out admin functions — scanning logs and altering blacklists — but you can decide how often you need to check in). Akismet by itself works very well, but it’s basically a spam filter after the fact, so it helps to block spambots before they eat up your bandwidth allowance.